Chapter 187: Sweep
"Quite the numbers~ Just now I must have cleared ten thousand or so, and they're still coming down just as fast. So this is an Undead Legion. How frightening~"
Kizaru's expression remained as lazily amused as ever. His mouth said "frightening." His face said he found the whole thing mildly interesting.
Wonder how the Admin and the others are doing. And Yukari — I've never actually seen her fight. The Admin mentioned once that aside from the Wandering Earth, she's the strongest in the group.
He muttered this to himself, then glanced back at the formation. He wasn't going anywhere for the moment.
The undead kept pouring out in an unbroken torrent. Even Kizaru found the sheer volume somewhat hair-raising. Nobody knew how long the formation would sustain itself — if it ran for twenty-four hours, the total number of undead descending on this world could reach into the tens of millions. The thought was genuinely unpleasant.
Most of the individual units weren't particularly formidable. The standard skeleton infantry couldn't have held their own against a Marine branch grunt. The problem, as always with undead invasions of this scale, was numbers.
Keep cutting them down before they hit the ground. Once the Admin figures out how to close the formation, I'll deal with whatever's accumulated below.
He raised one finger.
"Laser… Finger Pistol."
Dense golden beams streaked outward and swept another cluster of the sky clean.
His Glint-Glint Fruit was essentially purpose-built for this. Area denial, mass clearance, speed of light. He'd genuinely lost count of how many he'd killed. Somewhere in the twenty or thirty thousand range, probably.
Then something caught his eye.
"My my~ That's a large one. Is that a dragon? A bone dragon — yes, that's definitely a bone dragon. Quite sizeable — comparable to a Marine warship, I'd say. The wingspan alone makes it look even bigger~"
He pushed his amber lenses up his nose.
The creature hadn't fallen out of the formation. It had flown out.
Somehow, wings that were nothing but bare bone were generating enough force to keep it aloft. The skeletal architecture — where Kizaru could make it out — matched a Western dragon's frame.
"How frightening~ But I can't have you flying off now~"
His body dissolved into golden light and reappeared several kilometres away in an instant, now airborne, floating on the power of his fruit. The bone dragon filled his field of vision from this distance.
He tilted his head.
"I wonder if you can understand me. If you can hear this and comprehend it — have you ever been kicked at the speed of light?"
The bone dragon's vast skull swung toward the sound.
Apparently, yes, it could understand.
A flame burned in its eye socket — the size of an entire floor of a building. Cold, green, radiating no warmth. The heat that should have been there had been replaced by something colder than absence.
"Human — GRUK—"
Two syllables. Then its massive head snapped violently sideways, struck as though hit by a falling building. The facial bone structure began fracturing. The words cut off instantly. The enormous body spun away, completely out of its own control, the green skull-flame visibly dimming.
It tumbled through the air for over a kilometre before it managed to beat its wings enough to stabilise.
It shook its huge head, dazed and uncertain.
Before it could react to anything —
A flash of gold, top to bottom.
The skull-flame went out.
The body separated cleanly down the middle, the cut surface impossibly smooth — as if filed and polished. The two halves fell, crashing into the street below with a shockwave that sent cars airborne and shattered glass across a wide radius.
"One kick wasn't enough to kill it — that's a fairly impressive defence~ But one kick plus one sword is apparently sufficient."
Kizaru noted this and moved on to the next target.
He didn't know what rank this bone dragon would have been in its own world. He didn't need to. He just needed it dead. The Points reward came from clearing the undead, and the tens of thousands of Points he'd accumulated from the last quest had brought him to a level where he could fight two Four Emperors simultaneously. Another eleven thousand would only widen that margin further.
He was deliberately holding back, though. Full power in an urban environment would scatter collateral damage too widely. He didn't want to catch Umaru or her family in the blast radius.
Several kilometres away, Ryū snapped his fingers and turned a cluster of a dozen skeleton soldiers to ash, watching their skull-flames gutter out. He glanced in Kizaru's direction with a thoughtful expression.
"Logia-type really is something. That kind of mass-clearance capability is genuinely excellent for this kind of work."
His own approach was less dramatic but no less effective. Within a ten-metre radius, nothing with a skull-flame survived his Decompose-Decompose Fruit's passive field. The undead simply ceased to exist when they entered range. The street behind him was a continuous carpet of extinguished skeleton remains — sprawled, flameless, still.
He hadn't kept a running count. It hadn't seemed worth the mental overhead.
He scattered a fifteen-metre tall skeleton mid-rampage with a casual application of the fruit's power, continued moving at speed, and frowned slightly.
"All trash mobs so far. The flying one Kizaru dealt with was the only interesting target — and there was just the one? That can't be right."
If the quest difficulty were genuinely this low, the reward wouldn't have cleared five digits. There were stronger undead coming. Either as strong as the bone dragon or stronger.
His Observation Haki was covering the entire city at full deployment, painting an intricate map of positions and signatures in his awareness. He sorted through the undead presences — there were thousands — and among them, a handful of signatures significantly heavier than the rest.
Before he could move toward them, the signatures disappeared one by one.
He found Yukari's presence in roughly the same locations.
Ah. She already handled those.
For all practical purposes, the undead clearance wasn't the hard part. Even the strongest units so far hadn't exceeded Marine Headquarters Vice Admiral level — and the bone dragon had been at the upper end of that. The real challenge was going to be closing the formation.
He had absolutely no frame of reference for magic-system array structures. None. That was entirely Yukari's domain, and she was the uncontested authority on it within the Chat Group. Sakura was learning her system, but the master was Yukari herself.
My job is clearing this sector. It's close to where Umaru is, and Umaru can handle maybe two or three standard skeletons on a good day. Formation neutralisation is Yukari's problem.
Ryū moved through the streets at speed and continued clearing. Whether anyone filmed or photographed what he was doing was not a concern. This wasn't the Naruto world, where exposure would have consequences. This world had no framework for what was happening either way.
And then his Observation Haki caught something.
He stopped.
Looked up at the formation.
Several distinct signatures, emerging now — notably heavier than anything that had come through before. Stronger than the bone dragon.
He started counting.
One, two… five, six… ten, eleven… fourteen.
Fourteen of them.
He exhaled slowly.
"Four of us. Umaru doesn't factor into the combat numbers."
So three of them needed to cover fourteen targets. The math worked out to roughly three or four each — or one sustained free-for-all.
Looks like this is the part that earns the Points.
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